A fix for Wire junkies

I know John and Bets are fans--is anyone else anxiously awaiting the fifth and final season of The Wire in January? If so, the long article on David Simon, the show's creator, in the Oct. 22 New Yorker should help tide you over. One interesting tidbit is that the show's two biggest blocks of fans are people living in the "inner-city" and critics; as the article points out, "Sometimes the fan base of the show resembles the demographics of many American cities--mainly the urban poor and the affluent elite, with the middle class hollowed out." I have read elsewhere that drug dealers sometimes watch the show for tips on evading the cops. Simon sounds like a very smart, very intense guy--not surprising, not only given The Wire but also his involvement with Homicide and The Corner. There are a lot of interesting quotes, but this was one of my favorites:

So much of what comes out of Hollywood is horseshit. Because these people live in West L.A., they don't even go to East L.A. The only time they go downtown is to get their license renewed. And what they increasingly know about the world is what they see on other TV shows about cops or crime or poverty. The American entertainment industry get poverty so relentlessly wrong . . . Poor people are eeither the salt of the earth, and they're there to exalt us with their homespun wisdom and their sheer grit and determination to rise up, or they are people to be beaten up by Sipowicz . . . How is it that there's nobody actually on a human scale from the other America? The reason is they've never met anyone from the other America. I mean, they could ask their gardener what its like.